


death of an artist

by silentwalrus



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Giverny, M/M, Monet's Cottage, sam wilson should never have explained to bucky barnes what a weeaboo is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-08
Updated: 2018-11-08
Packaged: 2019-08-20 11:45:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16555172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silentwalrus/pseuds/silentwalrus
Summary: our intrepid heroes take a day trip to sunny, idyllic Giverny.





	death of an artist

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Смерть художника](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17432756) by [Tressa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tressa/pseuds/Tressa), [WTF_Marvel_Trash_Party](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WTF_Marvel_Trash_Party/pseuds/WTF_Marvel_Trash_Party)



Due to the nature of traveling, tourism and more specifically fucking France, on their day trip to Monet’s garden they end up sprinting to the train after some guy sees them looking directionally concussed and yells at them to get to the right platform. Steve, naturally, takes the lead; they, along with a bunch of other stampeding passengers, hop aboard into a sleek silver compartment and look for somewhere to sit down. 

Bucky experiences a brief moment of hesitation, looking around, but by then they’re already aboard and apparently it’s gonna leave any minute. Still. “You sure this is the right train?” 

“Yeah, this is it,” Steve says confidently, chivvying Bucky up the stairs to the second story of seats. 

It occurs to Bucky, looking out the window, that the train next to them is covered in a mural. It looks pretty impressionistic. Monet-ish, even. Maybe he should say something. On the other hand, he doesn’t know anything about art, and Steve seems pretty confident. Bucky’s still recovering from the bidet last night anyway, and he’s too tired to do more than sit back and close his eyes. 

Fifteen minutes later he cracks one open again. The train has started moving. Steve’s sitting upright and looking back and forth like a two hundred pound meerkat between the passing landscape and the train’s digital readout of stops. It says  _ prochaine arret: Rouen-Rive-Droit. Arrivee a 12h.  _

“Where’s Rouen,” Steve says, to nobody. Then, after consulting his phone, he says, “That’s in Normandy.” 

Bucky cracks another eye. “Is Giverny on the way?” 

Steve frowns at the map on his phone. “Ye-es.” 

“Okay,” Bucky says peaceably, closing his eyes again. “Wake me up when we get there.” 

“Yeah,” Steve says. “Yeah. It’s funny, I just could’ve sworn _prochaine arret_ means _next_ _stop.”_

Bucky’s eyes slap open. He stares at the ceiling for a bit. “Steve,” he says. “Hear me out.”

“Yeah,” Steve says vaguely, still staring at the readout.

“It’s just occurred to me,” Bucky says.

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m not sure this is the right train.”

“This is train eighteen, though. The guy told us to get on train eighteen.”

“Yeah. But,” Bucky says, “that doesn’t mean we  _ got on  _ train eighteen.”

“This was train eighteen! I saw the numbers.”

“The numbers on the right and the left of the train? Those numbers?” 

“Yeah.”

“So when I looked out the window at our platform number and saw seventeen, that was for a different train?” 

“Probably,” Steve says mulishly. 

“And the train across from us - the train on the  _ opposite  _ side of train sixteen - the train that was all covered in Monet paintings, that wasn’t eighteen, right?” 

“What? Monet paintings? What?” 

“They should revoke your goddamn artist’s cred in the Smithsonian,” Bucky says. “You don’t know Monet from Banksy.”

“Why didn’t you say something?” Steve demands. 

“I did! I said, are you sure this is the right train! And you said yes!”

“I didn’t  _ see  _ the Monet train! You should have said something!”

“I  _ did!  _ And you said  _ it’s fine!  _ And what  _ did _ thine Captain’s eyes see, Steven? Not the fucking station numbers, clearly!” 

“Oh god, we’re on the wrong train,” Steve says. 

“Fuckin’ looks it!” 

“Why didn’t you just - pull me off the train, or - “

“When have I ever succeeded in pulling you out of anything your entire life?”

“Okay,” Steve says. “Okay. Here’s the plan. When we go past Giverny, we jump out -”

“Jump out? Of what? The  _ window?”  _

“It’s fine! I can hear some air coming through, that means it opens -”

“I am not leaping off a moving train! Do you remember the last time I tried that, Steven? Do you remember the last time?”

“That wasn’t on purpose,” Steve says, crazily. “Bucky. We can’t go to Normandy. They’ve got World War Two memorials in Normandy.” 

“Oh god,” Bucky says, arrested. “Oh no.” 

“I told you. We have to get off this train.” 

“Try the window.”

They hustle up one end of the train. They hustle all the way down to the other end. It’s express. No stops. They’re going to Normandy.

“Okay,” Steve says, a steadying hand on the wall and another on Bucky. They’re between compartments. “Okay. We’re fine. We just get there and turn right around. We just get back on the returning train. We’ll go straight to Giverny this time.” 

“Oh yeah? And you know which train that is?”

“We’ll find out,” Steve says, in the tone of voice he usually uses to promise freedom and safety and apple pie to terrorist hostages. “We’ll do it right this time.”

“You  _ really  _ don’t want to go to Normandy,” Bucky observes.

“Are you kidding me? They have a  _ statue  _ of us in Normandy! We never even  _ fought  _ in Normandy!” 

“Well -”

“I have been,” Steve says crazedly, “to so many memorials. So many.” 

“Right.”

“They all think I want to see them.”

“You don’t.”

“I  _ don’t, _ ” Steve says emphatically. 

“Okay. Okay. I know you don’t. It’s fine. We’ll just,” Bucky looks around wildly, “take the return train right back. And get off at Giverny. We can still go to the gardens. It’s fine.” 

“God damned trains,” Steve hisses as they slink back to their seats. 

They get off at Rouen. They hustle across the platform. They get on the returning train. 

“This one is  _ definitely  _ going to Giverny,” Bucky says. “Right?” 

“Right,” Steve says. “Says here on the phone. I googled it. Google works.”

“Unlike your fucking eyeballs,” Bucky mutters, and they hunch down like the bargain bin fare evaders they are and make a pact to pretend to be asleep if spotted by any conductors. 

By the time they get off at Giverny they’re so emotionally obliterated that they get in the first vehicle they see, which happens to be a four-car tour trolley that promises to take them on a historical journey to the master of the impressionists. They have to pay sixteen euros to get on. Once on, everyone else that came off the train filters away into buses and cars and it becomes apparent that the two of them are the only people making such a bold decision. This is further highlighted by the way the trolley, for the next thirty minutes, completely fails to move. 

“Did we get scammed?” Steve mumbles, but he doesn’t sound like he can muster up the energy to care about it. Bucky can’t either. He’s busy tugging his hood up and untying his boots to put on his spare socks, because to add insult to injury it’s unseasonably cold out here in goddamn June. 

Another train pulls up at the station, disgorging a trickle of tourists. Some of them actually filter to the trolley, slumping into the bench seats. There is not a single individual getting on under the age of seventy, Bucky notes, and realizes this includes himself. 

He’s just about to ask Steve if there’s some kind of senior-attracting pheromone lure tucked under the roof or something when the trolley lurches into motion. The speakers crackle as the tour guide turns on her mike and announces something in both French and English about how they’re about to see some truly wild shit or whatever. Bucky’s just trying not to get rattled out of his seat. By the feel of it, the trolley has square wheels.

Then the guide starts playing youtube-playlist chillstep over the speakers, which is just noises designed to drive Bucky to the brink. “Is this vaporwave?” Steve says, frowning. 

“You know what it’s  _ called?”  _

“I tried a lot of things after I got out of the ice,” Steve says.

“Yeah, and so did I, but I never tried  _ vaporwave,”  _ Bucky says.

“You know what it’s called too,” Steve points out.

“Thanks to you!” 

“Remember I can tell when you lie,” Steve says. 

“You can’t tell up from down when it comes to me,” Bucky says. They rattle over a bridge. The speakers bloop rhythmically at them. Bucky wonders if it would be passé to jump off and drown. 

Monet’s Giverny, when they actually arrive, is a one-cow town missing both cow and town. There’s a series of charming cottages, many of which have been converted to tourist trap stores disgorging their screenprinted lures into the lane. Bucky counts at least four aesthetically pleasing haystacks. There’s plenty of restaurants, at least, and a map sign by the road. 

“Says the gardens are this way,” Steve says, squinting. 

Bucky, unfortunately, reads faster than him and always has. “There’s also a memorial,” he says under his breath, reporting critical intel. “Says for world war two pilots. Right up the hill.” 

“Wow, amazing,” Steve says, hurriedly taking Bucky’s arm and heading in the opposite direction. 

They find the gardens and Monet’s cottage eventually, though not before getting lost in a patch of woods maybe a hundred yards across and getting so demoralized they stop and buy tiny ice creams from a man selling them out of the back of his car. At least he sets them on the one true path to Monet’s cottage - which, when they arrive, has a line to get in stretching down the street.

Bucky checks his watch. “It’s almost four,” he says. They’ve had a good wander, all told; he’s feeling pretty charitable on account of the chocolate ice cream and also he doesn’t want to know how else they can fuck this up. “You wanna call it a day?”

“Absolutely not,” Steve says, a dark light burning in his eyes. 

“Okay,” Bucky says.

“Barnes,” Steve says, gripping Bucky’s shoulder. “I am getting inside that man’s house.” 

“Okay, okay,” Bucky says, eyeing the line. It eyes him back. “Sure you don’t want to sneak around to the back wall and give each other a boost?” 

“He’s the master of the impressionists,” Steve says, completely unhearing of any of Bucky’s helpful tactical suggestions. “His colors - his light -”

“His entrance fee,” Bucky grumbles, but tows them into line. 

Where they spend the next ten to two hundred years. Bucky feels entire civilizations of thought rise and die within his skull as the line oozes along, wreathed in cigarette smoke. Apparently Forties Bucky was a pack a day guy, but somewhere in the seventy Nazi-sponsored years a switch had flipped and now he can’t stand the smell. He can feel himself growing entirely new and unprecedented prejudices. Three separate people here are wearing what looks like the exact same outfit of badly hand-stitched skirts out of what looks like couch upholstery and Bucky is starting to feel strange stirrings that will probably culminate in beating them all to death with their own hand-tooled sensibly-soled leather boots.

He’d also like to know how much longer he has before he snaps and challenges every smoker here to bare-handed knife combat. “In the time we have spent in this line,” he says, “I could have  _ built  _ a garden.”

“Hush,” Steve mutters, staring hungrily at the entrance. 

The inside of the house is just as crowded as the goddamn Gare Lazarus or whatever, which is unsurprising given the goddamn line to get in. Steve, usually quite mild to harmless idiots, glares bitterly at everyone who even accidentally sways into his line of sight and blocks whatever scrap of wallpaper he’s communing with.

“Wow,” Bucky says. “Usually it’s me trying to kill civilians with my eyes.” 

“Tourists,” Steve mutters. “I should have said I’m Captain America and asked for a private viewing.”

“Then they’d have carted you off to see the war memorial,” Bucky says. 

Steve growls under his breath and keeps shuffling forward through the rooms. Bucky doesn't know what he's so fixated on. The walls are chock full of art but it all looks the same and not at all impressionistic, either. 

After the sitting room, the small bedroom, the big bedroom, the bathroom and four hallways, though, Bucky starts to get a certain suspicion. He squints closer at the art. “Steve,” he says.

“What.” 

“There’s a lot of, uh. Asian art. In here.” 

“I know.”

“Is that bamboo?” 

_ “I know.”  _

“Is this,” Bucky says slowly, “what Wilson meant. When he was talking about -”

_ “Don’t.” _

“- white folks who get really into Oriental -”

“ -  _ Japanese _ , we can’t say  _ Oriental -” _

“ - and draw cartoon ladies without any clothes on -” 

_ “Bucky,”  _ Steve begs. 

On the very next wall is a large photograph of the man himself. Bucky eyes it skeptically and reflects that he does not actually want Steve to tear his hair out in public. “Didn’t expect it from some old French painter, is all.” 

Steve makes a noise like balloon deflating and clutches the sides of his face. 

-o-

They stand in the gardens. The bamboo-filled, Japanese-styled gardens. They stare at the famous lily pads. 

“The flowers are nice,” Bucky ventures.

“God,” Steve moans into his hands.

“And the kitchen tiling, that was nice too.”

_ “God.”  _

"But the fact that you're gonna have to tell Sam that if Picasso was frozen in an iceberg for 70 years he would have owned a naked cartoon lady body pillow -"

“Monet,” Steve says, ragged. “It’s Monet.” 

“ - that, I think, is my favorite.” 

Steve emerges from his hands, eyes haunted, cored, a broken man. “We never should have come to France.” 

“Aw, don’t be dramatic,” Bucky says, feeling magnanimous in anticipation of recounting this to Wilson. He slings an arm over Steve’s shoulder. “C’mon. It’s not so bad. I’ll buy you a bootleg ice cream cone.” 

_ “God.”  _

“And we can facetime Wilson together about later.” 

_ “Bucky!”  _

**Author's Note:**

> monet's a fuckin weeb and that's cold hard facts baby


End file.
